Statistical Skier

The life of a professional ski racer seems pretty attractive at times. It’s hard work, to be sure, and like any other job parts of it must be very difficult mentally. But you get to spend a ton of time outdoors, travel to all sorts of awesome locales and best of all you get to ski. All the time.

It always seemed like a great life to me, provided you can afford it financially.  How long could you last skiing on the World Cup circuit without being fast enough to earn a serious living off of it?  Quite a while, it turns out.

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These are five of the more extreme examples that I found.  The best result is their best finishing place.  All of these statistics include both sprint and distance results.  Here’s a look at each of these five skier’s international careers: Continue reading ›

Maybe it’s the boredom of the offseason, but I sometimes just find myself noodling around in results data looking for anything strange. One random question that occurred to me a while ago was whether anyone had managed to finish in every single place (1st, 2nd,…,30th) in the points, over the course of their WC racing. Why is this interesting? Maybe it isn’t, who knows…

If we consider sprinting and distance separately, I was surprised to find thirteen different skiers who have finished at every position between 1st and 30th at least once. (The usual caveats apply about my results only going back to ~1992, so skiers who were finishing their career in the early 90’s are likely to be overlooked.)

Four of them are Italians! Weird. Two other curiosities here are that Mathias Fredriksson has actually doubled up on this feat: he’s finished at every position between 1st and 30th at least twice! The other oddity is that most of these folks took around 100 races (or more) to collect all thirty, except for Alexander Legkov who did it in only 78 races. He might have the best shot at matching Fredriksson’s achievement of doubling up, but only if he doesn’t race too fast and collect too many results near the top!

I figured there would be fewer people who’ve collected all thirty in sprint races, but in fact there are none! The most anyone’s managed is 27, and you’ll never guess who’d tied for the lead:

Our very own Andrew Newell! Tied with Renato Pasini; again the Italians pop up a bunch. For the complete set, Newell still needs to collect a 30th, 20th and the big one, a victory. Pasini’s road isn’t much easier, as he’s missing a 2nd, 6th and 19th.

I don’t know why I find this kind of fascinating, but I do. I’ll be sure to keep you updated as other skiers acquire the complete set.

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